fredag 19 maj 2017

Some larps and larp designers try to "solve" gender equality by making their larps gender neutral in one way or another. Some examples of solutions I have seen have been the following:

Women and men exist in the game World, but they all have the exact same resources and face the exact same challenges as a member of any other gender.

There are no genders, or only one gender in the game World.

There are men and women in the game World, but all the written roles are written as gender neutrals without reference to their gender identity, pronoun or any specific reproductive organs, such as an uterus. This does not mean they are agender, mostly once they are cast they get the same gender as the player in the Eyes of the other players.

My critique is this: With these methods it becomes harder to tell stories about real World sexism and feminism and that erases not only womens experiences and historic roles but also the stories of anyone who is trans and/or non-binary and has had to struggle with the gender binary wiev of the real World.

The gender Neutral character also becomes mostly "male" because we were all raised in a World where the cis-man (also, a White cis-man) is the norm.

I have tried to work with this by either Writing character who have a gender identity of their own or what I did for Witches of Ästad Farm, where I wrote all the characters as female and then rewrote them after casting, having a look at what "social gender" the player had asked for their role. I did demand of the players that they choose female or male, because I wanted to portray the way the society of Swedish 1940-ies desperatly pressed everyone into those strict gender roles.